St. John 15:1-8
Divine Service
Easter 5 (Mother's Day)

To my Brothers Christ: Greetings;

And to my Sisters in Christ: Happy Mother’s Day!

Several years ago on a Mother’s Day, I was asked to preach at my fieldwork congregation in a suburb of Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Part of the instructions from the pastor was to ‘put together a good Mother’s Day sermon.’  Mother’s Day that year fell on Good Shepherd Sunday, and trying to manipulate that text into a Mother’s Day sermon was a monumental task…and it did justice to neither Mother’s Day nor the Gospel Lesson for the day.  When I saw that I was scheduled to preach again on Mother’s Day while I was on vicarage I asked my supervisor about preaching about Mother’s Day.  His reply was a relief to me:  he said only if it properly fit one of the texts of the day.  That good advice holds true today – to me our texts don’t particularly illustrate anything about mothers.

The setting for our Gospel lesson is at a time when Jesus knew that great trauma was coming, both for Himself and for His disciples.  Jesus and His disciples had just finished the celebration of the Passover meal, what we also have come to know as the “Last Supper” on Maundy Thursday evening.  He had instituted Holy Communion, and talked more than ever about the fact that He was going to die very soon.  St. John tells us at the end of Chapter 14 that they were leaving the place where they had eaten the meal and moving on to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus would enter into extreme anguish over what was coming, and where He would be arrested which would lead to His death the next day. 

Picture, if you will, Jesus and His disciples walking along from the upper room where they ate the Passover meal to the Garden of Gethsemane.  Jesus has on His mind the terrible things that are going to happen to Him.  As He and His disciples were walking along, they may have walked by a vineyard.  And maybe the vinedresser, the gardener, was out working in the vineyard, but that's not terribly likely because it was night, or maybe it is just the neatness of the vines and the evidence that they had been carefully pruned.  Whatever it was, it brings to Jesus' mind an image that relates well to the heaviness of His heart as He contemplated the suffering and death that awaited Him. 

Martin Luther has a delightful story where he imagines what the vine might say to the gardener if it could think and talk and if the vine could feel when the gardener cut on it, hoed around it and so forth to make it more fruitful.  Here is the conversation Luther envisions between the vine and the gardener: The vine sees the vinedresser, or gardener, coming with his pruning shears and other tools to work around it and says: “What are you doing? That hurts, don't you know that? Now I must wither and decay, for you are removing the soil from around my roots and are tearing away at my branches with those iron teeth.  You are tearing and pinching me everywhere, and I will have to stand in the ground bare and seared.  You are treating me worse than any tree or plant.” And the gardener would then reply: “You are a fool and do not understand.  For even if I do cut a branch from you, it is a totally useless branch; it takes away your strength and your sap.  Then the other branches, which should bear fruit, must suffer.  Away with it! This is for your own good.” Then the vine would say: “But you do not understand! I have a different feeling about it!” The gardener declares: “But I understand it well.  I am doing this for your welfare, to keep the foreign and wild branches from sucking out the strength and the sap of the others.  Now you will be able to yield more and better fruit and produce good wine.” The same thing is true when the gardener applies the cow manure to the root of the vine; this, too he does for the benefit of the vine even though the vine might complain and say: “What in the world are you doing? Isn't it bad enough for you to hack and cut at me all day long, trimming this and cutting off that branch? Why, now are you putting that foul smelling stuff at my roots?! I am a vine, to yield delicious grapes to make wonderful wine, and you are putting that terrible smelling stuff near me, it will destroy me!” Of course, we know well that the badly smelling manure does well to put fertilizer and nutrients into the soil so that the vine might grow and prosper and produce an even better crop. 

Well, that's an interesting little exchange, but what does it mean? For Jesus, Who was facing His own death, knowing that He was going to be arrested and His disciples would flee from Him later that night, it was the assurance that regardless of how bad things got in the meantime, this was a process of pruning, clipping and purifying that would result in good things in the end.  Even Jesus, Who knew fully well that He would rise again from the dead just three days later, didn't take the suffering and death He faced lightly.  We human beings are physical beings, and were made by God to live in this world, and when we come face to face with the reality that we will one day be taken from this world, or when something of our physical existence is torn away, it causes us grief, doesn't it? It hurts! And lest you think we are talking only about the grief that results from death, please know that many things in life, when we lose them, such as a relationship or the ability to do this or that or even good health, there is grief. 

Jesus is here seeking to put troubles, even the most extreme troubles leading right to death, into perspective.  As He walks with His disciples from that upper room celebration of the Passover meal to the Garden of Gethsemane, knowing what is going to happen that night, He speaks about being the vine.  He's making a commentary on His own suffering and death, and putting it into perspective.  Here's what Luther imagines Jesus saying right after talking about the vine and branches: “See, I am being fertilized and cultivated as a branch on the vine.  All right, dear hoe and clipper, go ahead.  Chop, prune, and remove the unnecessary leaves.  I will gladly suffer for it, because these are God's hoes and clippers.  They are applied for my good and welfare.  The world is mistaken in its assumption that this is my end, that I shall die and cease to exist.  No, this is ultimately for my good, and the good of all, that I suffer, that I be tortured and killed in this way.”

When troubles come, it's difficult to look at them this way, isn't it? We might even think that this attitude is unrealistic.  And to many, maybe it is.  After all, many church bodies teach that God rewards our being ‘good’, our behaving in a ‘civilized manner’, our attempts to fully obey God’s Law.  And these are the things that our human nature tells us will win our favor with God, and so thereby we can avoid earthly troubles.  And those who will prey on the itching ears of human nature will take advantage of the situation, and will try to convince you that your behavior is your route both earthly peace and to eternal life in heaven.

But still earthly troubles come.  And God is always calling out to us in the midst of these tragedies of life and seeking to draw us closer to Him.  And the closer we are to Him, the more fruitful we are as Christians.  This life is a continual process of tearing away from this present, physical existence.  When we are comfortable and things are going well, we don't give it much thought.  But as we are thrown off balance, we begin wondering, questioning and searching.  This is a part of God's overall plan.  This is the reason that God threw this world into chaos in the first place, so that we would seek, and search, so that we would be pruned into being slowly separated from the things of this life until the time that we are altogether separated from them as we face our own death. 

We have to admit, there is an element of mystery to all this.  Because this would all be a bit easier to swallow if it looked like everyone were being “pruned” the same, wouldn't it?  But it seems that some are going through more troubles than others, that some are being pruned more than others.  If I told you that I knew why that this was so, I'd be lying to you.  That – the seeming injustice of how some seem to be treated better than others, how some seem more afflicted with troubles than others – is part of the pruning process.  God calls out through such things and says, “I know you don't understand.  I'm calling for you to trust that I know best.” It's not easy, is it?  We have to abandon how things look around us and trust instead only on God's promises.

So what is the good news?  The good news is that God takes care of us, even in the midst of troubles.  God takes care of us, in the midst of pain, suffering, sickness, even death.  For what the devil seeks to inflict upon us, God takes hold of and uses for our good.  Does it still hurt?  Does it still break our hearts?  Does it still cause us to doubt, worry, fret, and wonder about God's goodness?  Yes!  But God is in control.  Think about it.  When Jesus spoke these words, He was looking ahead to all that would happen to Him.  The devil tried to demoralize the disciples by having Jesus arrested.  The devil tried to provoke Jesus through the absurdity of a trial to convict Him.  The devil tried to anger Jesus into striking back by having various people ridicule and spit upon Him.  The devil worked through the scourging to inflict great pain on Jesus.  The devil laughed when Jesus was nailed to the cross.  The devil smugly thought he was winning the victory when Jesus was dying for the sins of the world.  And if you take a very narrow view of each of those events, they were painful, they were demoralizing, they were demeaning and degrading.  But look at the bigger picture.  God the Father, the gardener, used all this “pruning” (to use the words of Jesus in the parable) to bring about a wonderful harvest!  The harvest is our salvation!  The harvest is our life with God forever.

Yes, God takes care of you.  God loves you.  You are each a strong branch on the vine.  Yes, that means that you may be pruned, and it that pruning may hurt.  It means that we will all face all kinds of problems.  But it also means that God is watching out for you.  It means that despite the nastiest of what the devil can serve up, God is in control, and God will ultimately prevail and win the victory – for us!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

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